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Ernst Hanfstaengl

German businessman

Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives.

Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl (February 2, 1887 – November 6, 1975) worked for both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler. Hanfstaengel introduced himself to Hitler after the speech and began a close friendship and political association that would last through the 1920s and early 1930s. After participating in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hanfstaengel briefly fled to Austria, while Hitler, who was injured, sought refuge in Hanfstaengel's home in Uffing, outside of Munich. For much of the 1920s, Hanfstaengel introduced Hitler to Munich high-society and helped polish his image. He also helped to finance the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf, and the NSDAP's official newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Hanfstaegl was removed from Hitler's staff in 1933.

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Tell him the Reichstag is burning.

The Jews who already have been ousted were put out because they were morally and politically unfit to safeguard German interests.

In the last 14 years Jewry has achieved positions of influence which it has grossly misused morally, financially and politically in an unheard-of manner, with the result that the German people crumbled morally, financially, and politically.

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

The same Jewry now is seeking to smirch Germany's renaissance.

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

Anti-Semitism is not based on strictly religious grounds and is not directed against the Jewish faith as such. However, all German Christians resent and denounce the fact that the Jews have been the chief advocates of atheism. They have influenced the workers' children through the Communist youth organizations, of which they are the leading spirit...

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

If we had wanted to conduct a pogrom against the Jews, it would all have been over now.

What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in two and a half hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years. Because of his miraculous throat construction, he was able to create a rhapsody of hysteria. In time, he became the living unknown soldier of Germany.

The place looks like a delicatessen... You could have opened up a flower and fruit and wine shop with all the stuff stacked there. People were sending presents from all over Germany and Hitler had grown visibly fatter on the proceeds.

After visiting Hitler. Quoted in "The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler" - Page 215 - by Robert George Leeson Waite - History - 1993

I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.